Shock, confusion as buried man resurrects

A family in Kitui now wants the body of a man they mistakenly buried exhumed, after the man they believed dead returned home.

Mbiti Kitheka, 60, who left home thirty years ago was believed dead and family members buried a man who reportedly bore the same name.

Mbiti walked out of the homestead a young man one sunny day in 1985, leaving behind his wife, their children and his extended family only to return an old man of 60, but he says he was never too far from home.

Mbiti now wants his siblings to give him his share of the inheritance.

Two years ago, when family members received a phone call informing them that a security guard who answered to the same name as their kin had been killed in Embu and his body mutilated, they assumed it was their brother and brought him home for burial.

However, the real Mbiti was to return as casually as he had left, his old identity card proving that he was their long-lost brother.

He narrated that he worked as a casual labourer for years and lives in abject poverty in a little room in Kanyaa whose rent of Sh300 is paid each month by a church.

Although Mbiti wants his birth right, a portion of his father’s land, the land has already been subdivided among his siblings.

The Family now wants the body they mistakenly buried exhumed and cleansing rituals performed as per tradition.

Report by Wilkister Nyambwa